The World Order: Rule By Chaos

A New Era

As we go to press, an inspiring explosion has rocked this society.
It changes everything. But the our activity still may play a part.
We intend this irregular magazine to be a kind of can opener,
a tool to decode and break through today's hermetically sealed
system of rhetoric.

The stakes have been raised once again. The events in LA show
just how fragile America is. Whatever problems the riots had,
they moved the dispossessed of the world to a new level of struggle.
It is now much easier to imagine a new society. It is harder to
imagine anyone could stop us. We expect all the invisible struggles
of daily life to become more intense. With the struggle now more
in the open, all the repressive systems of this society weigh
more heavily on our actions.

A system of rigid and complete control has produced those who
will not accept its rule. In America, the LA riots showed that
the utterly alienated are much more common than the constant polling
claimed.

The world system has become more integrated and more fragile.
The total price of good produced on the world economy has grown
larger in recent years. But the usefulness of the market has become
less and less to more and more people.

ASAN works to show the repression and resistance hidden in "normal
life." It is critical to understand the order of daily routine
that the poor of South-Central LA repudiated for a short, critical
period.

Most of this introduction was written before the events in South
Central. Still, they look forward to an extreme break with routine
similar to the riots. We don't paint the riots in rosy colors.
But the systematic brutality of this society makes a revolt necessary.
ASAN will be producing a leaflet on riots. If it is not in the
magazine, you can write the PO Box.

Anti-News:

The usual facts and issues in the daily paper are like points
of snow on a screen of an old black and white TV. They form a
fuzzy, uncertain picture of a slowly collapsing social order.

The order of things hides in plain sight. By themselves, all the
old news stories of war victories, drug murders, October Surprises,
new computer viruses, vast nations collapsing, massive starvation,
and celebrity balls tell us nothing about the world.

It's more important to see that everyone just goes home and watches
the news. The missing ingredient of news is the total condition
of life. Work and stress, TV and desperate hope are the unstated
contexts of life in America. The powerlessness of most people
allows the unreality of news to continue.

The news is just the first trap in a whole series of walls that
stand in the way of our understanding today's world. News commentators
can speak as if homelessness, skyrocketing murder rates or AIDS
are things that appear with no plan and no explanation. Their
quick changes to other topics keep us from questioning this. News
thus stops us from thinking about the continuing situation of
life today.

"Here's today's facts: You can scream all you want about
the emperor having no clothes; doesn't matter anymore. We got
naked emperors on every street corner; it's become a lifestyle
of choice."[Op Ed Commentator Jon Carroll admits universal
corruption in America in the Friday, April 10, 1992 San Francisco
Chronicle.]

Information as commodity - all truth as something that is both
buyable and changeable - this is only that last wrinkle in the
system that begins with work, with us selling our time to buy
our survival. (See The Information Age, page 27, this issue)

Universal corruption is just one by-product of making all human
activity sellable. But like Jon Carroll, the system today often
willing to admit its bankruptcy once it has convinced we have
no alternative.

Rule By Chaos

In the movie Dark Star, the crew of a space ship move from star
to star. Their mission is to destroy any planets capable of supporting
life, since that life might someday threaten earth. The same principle
was used by our rulers during the eighties.

Rule by chaos is our phrase for the way this system harnesses
its decay and confusion for its own protection.

Yesterday, there seemed to be no enemy at all. Saddam Hussein
and Noriega just proved that no real opposition can be allowed
to be visible. But there was violence and propaganda meant to
destroy an invisible, implied, enemy, an unnamed menace.

For the last twenty years, our decaying capitalist society has
managed to seem on top by raising the ante. As the conditions
of life in this system become more unbearable, the system focuses
its resources on preventing any knowledge of its own existence.
AIDS, drugs wars, economic crises and anti-sex hysteria serve
to stop any statement of an alternative to the system.

Lies are planted inside each other to keeping any clear view from
appearing. Racism and sexism are hidden in just about every message
the media puts out. But this underlying message, that whites and
men get some great benefits from this society, is a lie in a subtler
way. The only "benefit" that most men or most whites
might expect today is a dull, repressed suburban existence of
slaving for the real rulers of the system.

Martin Luther King is honored in every elementary school for helping
black people escape oppression. But statisticians admit that both
overall average black incomes and total inequality are worse than
when King started.

The supposed victory of women's rights and the sexual revolution
have left a world where television enforces sexual roles more
and more stereotypically. This is a world where women's sexuality
is as repressed as ever, a world of bulemia and skyrocketing plastic
surgery.

The distorted viewpoint of television makes it hard to determine
whether today's confusion is new or old and whether it is planned
or random.

Our position is that the present form of the system is a fairly
recent change. It began 40-50 years ago and has accelerated ever
since. The spectacle, one technical name for this system, has
not changed its methods much since the sixties. The spectacle
has merely expanded and intensified its project.

The totalitarian economy is now normal. Its creation lies at the
end of the history of the last 200 years or 2000 years. The assassination
of JFK is only a small part of this process. Like earlier forms
of capitalism, this all-controlling system leads to crisis. As
the present system stage-manages more and more, it gets more and
more resources to resist different crises. But now, even these
resources seem to be wearing thin. Thus it gives us the crisis
of everything.

The change in government today is simply that the system is moving
into high gear. Change lately is not so much qualitative as quantitative.
There is more and more of the same old shit. The war against life
is being expanded to every possible front.

The S&L crisis, the environments' destruction, the collapse
of the USSR, the Gulf War and permanent recession all come from
a world system that has been declining for years. Things have
simply now gotten so big that now the decay can no longer be swept
under the rug.

Today, despair is the strategy. The shock of misery is expected
to stop people from complaining. In 1980, a vast system of control
was already in place. The crisis of capital made Ronald Reagan
and the entire ruling class hit the control buttons harder and
harder. The effects are visible. Vast misery enfolds a quickly
increasing amount of people throughout the world. The "carrot"
and the "stick" must be used more and more often.

The system has only strengthened itself by destroying all concepts
of opposition. It must destroy all concepts of real dissent, all
logic, and all apparent ways of people banding together.

The American dream is very fragile. On every level, refusal is
common. Till now, it has been invisible. Contempt for authority
has been increasing for twenty years. The boss, teacher or cop
has never had such little respect. Hatred and resistance to work
are nearly constant.

Struggle

But the ruling class' strategy is not to pacify. Instead they
manage a scapegoat section of the working class to feed the fear
of the workers slightly above them. Their brutal prison system
is a conscious effort to divide us by manufacturing thousands
of Willie Hortons. They manipulated crack and poverty in similar
ways.

At the same time it decays from within, the ruling class has lost
all ability to openly rule, has lost all positive support, and
only survives by constantly throwing different groups against
each other.

We'll be spiralling outward in the opposite direction to the dominant
whirlpool of non-thought. To describe the entire system, we incidentally
break the accepted categories of information. This magazine is
not news, essays, poetry or art. We talk about the hated generality;
everything, the totality, the system. Moreover, we assume that
the reader is engaged in struggle in one way or another.

To our detriment, opposition has been forced into a secret and
ambiguous language. LA Raiders' jackets now have the connotation
of city to city raiders, thus gang toughness. And gang toughness
is desired by many non-gang members. This is a whole language
of anger and resentment. But this language begins with the dominant
society and thus isn't yet able to gain its own coherence.

Our goal is to be at the service of the various strands of coming
together into a coherent force of resistance.

Disaster

Even before the latest riots, the San Francisco Bay Area suffered
various bracing disruption of routine in the last years. We have
had the earthquake, the riots against the war and the huge fire
in the Oakland Hills.

Even simple disruptions could foreshadow a world without capitalism.
Contrary to the media's puppets, the time when normal organization
stops is not a time of fear but a festival.

Between the time that a disaster happens and it is announced on
radio, the world seems transformed. This appeal of disasters is
a measure of the alienation of the present landscape.

The difference between the Hills before and after the Oakland
fire brings this home. Before the fire, the landscape was closed-in,
each house was its own pseudo-environment. It projected a sad
myth of property, family and nature. The destruction of the neighborhood
freed the hillside. After the fire, a single dramatic vista opened
without even a claim to being natural, charming or not to be touched.
The ash, broken chimneys and melted glass revealed how a thing
is not always a mass-produced commodity. A thing can be just a
thing with weight, color and texture but no price, advertising
or prestige. The gawkers who flooded the area were inspiring in
their curiosity and their ghoulish interest in the misery of the
formerly wealthy homes.

During the San Francisco Earthquake, when the Bay Bridge was down
and TV was barely transmitting, the symbols of commodity society
were transformed. The shock of seeing economy stop gives one an
inkling of what an uprising could become. At the time of the earthquake,
I sat with some friends who worked at a movie theater. For a few
moments, it stopped functioning as a commercial enterprise. Freed
from its function in the economy, this theater broke down into
a collection of boards, metal, tools and food.

You realize that, like muzak, all pieces of merchandise have their
special qualities piped in from the outside. Fur coats, BMWs and
credit cards mean nothing when the framework of society is drained
away.

Our present system has gone further in showing how the normalcy
of daily routine comes from meaning telegraphed in from afar.
Daily Life seems normal only because everyone thinks work, prestige,
and property will continue tomorrow and the day after. We cannot
and do not reduce change to individual rational decisions; the
myth of democracy.

Panic is natural when things seem to change from nothing. Riots
get their explosive force from a simultaneous change in everyone's
expectations. As we've seen, this easily erases scientifically
formulated happy consensus of the media.

All these things are fragments of a new life trying to come into
existence. It exists already as potential, not matter how much
effort they spend trying to crush it. It exists in any project
where a group of the dispossessed directly and collectively realizes
their desires.

As a short hand, we sometimes call this new way of life communism.
This risks confusion with the recently disintegrated Stalinist
nations and exposes us to the ridicule of TV commentators. Beyond
a desire to describe exactly, we are trying to speak to those
who feel instinctively that everything the media says is a lie.
[See Background, pg. 2, for a little more on this.]

The anti-war movement showed what kind of social control the present
system has. In San Francisco, more than 200,000 people marched
for peace in two demonstrations coming two weeks apart. They were
mostly spontaneous and were far more than the official left could
control. Even television news wound up calling on people to volunteer
as monitors for the official peace groups. But people's impulses
wound up easily controlled.

The system has people utterly outflanked in the realm of ideas.
Most people called for peace and were rewarded only a few weeks
later.

The system however, has only a limited ability to police the urges
of the people today. With all the TV boosting of the war, the
amount of active support for the war was small. With propaganda
and organized illiteracy cutting off all rational objections to
the present world, spontaneous explosions are becoming more and
more common.

The Gulf War itself show how the devices that create reality are
more and more tightly managed today. It was not just a matter
of TV. Polls were constantly used to herd passive viewers to one
position or another. The war itself had to be quick enough not
to disrupt general resignation.

War and Amnesia

The only large pro-war rally that the ruling class held during
the Gulf War was the superbowl. The spectators were a captive
audience whipped into a murderous frenzy. But no one noticed the
irony of such a set-up. This proved the point well. If no one
cares that everyone at a demonstration has been bought, then the
demonstration still has legitimacy. In fact, the rally demonstrated
both support for the war and a generic willingness to be manipulated.

If the Gulf War had gone on for more than a year, you could have
seen this country explode with more force than America in the
sixties. But this wasn't expected since the war was planned to
be short.

Even if the majority still supported the war, the danger of people
beginning to think was real for this system - thus the war had
to stop almost as soon as it began.

Fortunately, the shine of the victory of Operation Desert Storm
last as long in people's memories as a an average coke commercial.
This isn't surprising. The war was simply a point on the iceberg
of social peace. The amnesia require by social peace must also
apply to the victories of the system.

Some secrets must be kept from even those holding them. College
professors, the CIA and corporate presidents have no more of an
idea of a total capitalist system than the average person. So
no intelligence expert understood how many people were stretched
to breaking in South Central LA.

The U.S. lost much more in LA than it won in the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. strategy since the sixties has been to destroy all memory
of opposition. Thus LA destroyed everything the U.S. achieved
since the sixties.

Our present system must control everything just to keep the daily
routine going. It goes further in making the normalcy of daily
life come from a nation-wide and world-wide balance of resignation.

Suddenly the state of the world caught up with this nation, the
largest fortress of the world's rulers. So far the enemy doesn't
have any new strategy at all. So its all up for grabs for now.

No one sits and calculates their response to today's world. More
and more, each person processes the inputs and lives within the
general expectations. An event, such as the Gulf War, can go from
unthinkability to apparent universal acceptance in a few months.
Now, few traces of the war remain in the average American's memory.
The LA riots seemed to appear from nowhere also. We can prepare
for interesting times ahead.